How to Look at Other People

Something happened to American visual culture when
Barack Obama
was elected president of the United States: The dominant (and
domineering) gaze of history was interrupted. Instead of being
unrepresented or misrepresented, a black man, woman, and children
became representatives for all. It’s a move that blew the
circuits on the system. Whatever happens next, for now we’re all here
in the invigorating dark, awaiting the startup whir on a new engine of
representation, one with the potential to be truly
postcolonial—to correct the exaggerations, rationalizations, and
distortions that come from governing and being governed at a literal
and metaphorical distance. The Obamas don’t signal that we all see each
other clearly now, just that the mutual view is bound to be less blurry
if one race isn’t monopolizing the power position.

The current exhibitions at the Frye Art Museum could not be more
relevant to this transformation. They are about looking across the
colonial divide—looking at exotic others from a ruling perch,
looking back at the faceless entity of a distant government. The oldest
artworks, in a show called Napoleon on the Nile, were
commissioned by Napoleon and brought back by droves of “savants” he
sent to Egypt; he sought to slide Egyptian culture under a French
microscope for the purpose of one day dominating it. The newest
artworks, in a simultaneous separate show called Empire, are by
contemporary artists driven by an awareness of the political history of
optics: the history of who has looked at whom, and how. (There is also
a show of works from the Frye’s collection, called Gaze, but it
is both dim-witted and overbearing, a fatal combination if ever there
was one.)

The center of Empire, its power seat, is in a dark room at
the back of the museum (rather appropriately separated from the rest of
the uneven show). This room is normally enterable from the other
galleries, but for the first time in the building’s history, the room
has been mostly sealed off. The artwork in this dark room, Funk
Staden (2007), needs its own space.

It’s a video installation with two walls of screens and mirrors,
emanating a loud, irresistible beat. The walls curve toward each other
like two eyelids. What you see in the mirrors depends on who you are;
what you see in the videos is young people partying on a rooftop at
dusk intercut with woodcut prints, the partyers performing a parodic
reenactment of what’s seen in the interstitial images. The woodcuts are
from the first European bestseller: Hans Staden’s 1557 True
History, an account of his capture and release by the
Tupinambá Indians in Brazil, whom he portrayed as lusty
cannibals. Europeans ate up his account the way he said the Brazilian
natives consumed their captives; True History became the portrait of the tropics. Still today, Brazilian schoolchildren learn
about Staden’s colonial fantasia.

Mauricio Dias was one of those Brazilian schoolchildren. Today, he
and his collaborator Walter Riedweg (originally from German
Switzerland) are headlining contemporary artists, but they position
themselves as art outsiders in many ways. They make art by identifying
people who are unrepresented in the art world—Others—and
making videos along with them. (In the past, this has included sex
workers, janitors, and prisoners around the world.)

In Funk Staden (expanded from its appearance at 2007’s
Documenta), there’s Staden and there’s Funk, referring to
contemporary Rio de Janeiro’s funk scene. Drug dealers in the poor
sections of Rio set up elaborate funk balls the way kings once presided
over courts—and, being drug dealers, their underworld
celebrations are to the “civilized world” as mysterious and frightening
as the doings of Staden’s cannibals. The people who come to funk balls
are not trackable in the global economy: They do not have credit cards
or anything like mortgages. Dias and Riedweg, who live part-time in Rio
(Dias’s hometown), befriended some funk scenesters. They couldn’t shoot
video in the funk balls because cameras aren’t allowed (for security
reasons!). Instead, they found a rooftop where they could stage their
video. They selected participants according to physical appearance:
each one notable in some way (tall, gender-indeterminate, spectacular
dancer). Having known Staden’s book already, the participants pretty
much improvised the rest.

On the most obvious level, the actor-
participants are making
fun of the idea that the caricatures in Staden’s book could represent
them. They throw a white blowup doll around as if they plan to cook and
eat her. Their dancing is hypersexualized. But they also become objects
for our delectation. We see ourselves reflected in the mirrors,
uncomfortably watching them, as they’re reenacting scenes that were
doubly translated: described first by Staden and then drawn by the
woodcut artist, who had not traveled to Brazil at all. We’re consuming
them again, but now we’re consuming something triply digested already.
In the parlance of cannibalism, what do we take in when we visually eat
this new-old stew? How does it change our own constitution?

There’s another type of footage—funk-party footage that is
spinning, as if to capture the viewer’s roiling state of mind. It comes
from a set of cameras attached to the top of a pole created to look
like the one seen in the woodcuts, which Staden described the cannibals
using to spear their enemies. This spinning panopticon is not used in
the typical way, to make others feel watched. Here the artists give the
panopticon—a symbol of institutionalized, all-surveilling
power—to the watched, and by turning it so furiously they
exaggerate its omniscience and confound its ability to see. The screens
show just a blur. That old circuit is shorted.

For years, these artists have been proposing an aggressive rubbing
of the collective eyes, a restart of the feast of visual consumption
across social lines. Though they made Funk Staden in 2007, they
feel newly encouraged about its themes. Visiting Seattle recently,
their plane touched down just as Obama was elected president. Two
mornings later, sitting at the museum, Dias was still moved. “We’ve
come to a new moment in colonial history,” he announced. The table is
set for a new feast.